Did you know... Henry VIII vs. Thomas Becket

Did you know, on 16 November 1538, mindful of the clash between Church (Archbishop Thomas Becket) and State (King Henry II) in the twelfth century, King Henry VIII decreed that Thomas Becket’s name should be ‘erased and put out of all books’, not ‘called a saint but Bishop Becket, sometime archbishop of Canterbury’.

The glittering shrine containing his bones in Canterbury Cathedral - which had become a centre of pilgrimage as popular as Rocamadour, Assisi and Santiago de Compostela – was stripped of its gold and jewels and destroyed. The treasures were carried off in two huge chests requiring six men to carry each. The story goes that King Henry had a huge ruby (the gift of the French king Louis VII at the shrine in 1179) made into a thumb-ring which he wore openly.

He declared Becket a traitor, and ordered his bones burned. Henry personally vetted the proclamation: ‘There appeared nothing in his life and exterior conversation whereby he should be called a saint, but rather esteemed (judged) to be a rebel and traitor to his prince’. Many images and stained glass windows featuring Becket were destroyed or removed. What prompted this destruction?

Henry VIII, desperate for a male heir to secure the Tudor line, wished to divorce his wife Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn. The Pope, at this time a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor who also happened to be Catherine’s nephew, refused to co-operate. When King Henry discovered Anne was pregnant, he married her in secret in 1533. In 1534, Henry used Parliament to pass the Act of Supremacy, declaring himself Supreme Head - on earth - of the Church of England, thus breaking the Pope’s power in England and enabling divorce for King Henry.

Anyone could be asked to swear an oath acknowledging Henry’s supremacy. From 1536 to 1541, in a set of administrative and legal processes managed by Thomas Cromwell, Henry began disbanding the monasteries and appropriating much of their wealth, causing profound changes in England. In 1538, he targeted Becket’s shrine in Canterbury. Despite King Henry’s efforts, however, Becket’s fame endures.

Portsmouth Cathedral was consecrated as a finished building on 30 November 1991.

It had begun life as the Church of St Thomas, founded in 1185 by Jean de Gisors, and  dedicated by him to Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in 1170 and made a saint in 1173.

The images show an artist’s realisation of Becket’s magnificent shrine before its destruction, and a commemorative tile based on a pilgrim’s token of the Middle Ages.